TAMMS (AP) - Faygie Fields' escape from years of solitary
confinement on the toughest wing of Illinois' only state-run
super-max prison began with food.

He claimed there were rat droppings in his rice, bugs in his
beans and poison in his Tylenol.

Guards at the supermax Tamms Correctional Center in the southern
tip of Illinois told Fields to cut it out. He wasn't going to fake
his way to the easier prison mental health unit. It was all an act,
they said. He had tried it before.

Reports from other lockups, where Fields was often held in
solitary, laid out his dismal disciplinary history. He threw
Kaopec-tate, milk cartons, urine, tomatoes, Kool-Aid, a food tray.
He grabbed at keys. He pulled away from handcuffs. Fields was just
plain bad, the reports concluded.

What the supermax staff didn't know because records were not
initially forwarded was that while in his teens, Fields had been
committed four times to Chicago-area mental hospitals with a
diagnosis of schizophrenia and collected disability payments
because of mental illness. Untreated schizophrenics can result in
violent actions. Fields was sentenced to state prison in 1984 at
age 25 for shooting a man to death during a drug deal.

According to the Illinois Department of Corrections, Fields is
among the "worst of the worst," an extremely violent inmate who
cannot be safely held anywhere but at Tamms, a maximum discipline
and security prison.

But critics of the prison say Fields is a victim of a deeply
flawed policy that punishes mentally ill inmates for behavior they
cannot control by placing them in solitary confinement for long
periods, in many cases 10 years or more.

Such punishment, some critics say, amounts to torture worse than
that experienced by suspected terrorists at the U.S. military
prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

After his transfer 11 years ago to Tamms, Fields coped in ways
bizarre and self-destructive common to many inmates held in
continuous solitary confinement. He sliced his arms and throat with
bits of glass, metal and paint chips. A prison doctor who stitched
him up once testified he didn't always inject anesthetic because
the skin of many Tamms inmates became numb from massive scarring
from repeated self-mutilation.

Fields smeared excrement in his cell so often that maintenance
men painted it with an easier to clean coating. He swallowed glass.
Prison officials charged him $5.30 for tearing up a state-owned
sheet to make a noose to kill himself.

And then in 2004, after he had been held alone and often naked
in a segregation cell for nearly six years, two psychiatrists
called to testify in an ongoing lawsuit about conditions at the
prison examined him and his medical records and said Fields was a
schizo-phrenic who needed immediate treatment. They also reviewed a
long-ignored 1999 report by psychiatrist Dr. Bernard Rubin, a
former director of the Illinois Department of Mental Health,
diagnosing Fields a year after his arrival at Tamms as a paranoid
schizophrenic whose condition was deteriorating. The MacArthur
Justice Center of Chicago filed the lawsuit on behalf of Fields and
three other Tamms inmates.

Two Illinois Department of Corrections psychiatrists did not
find Fields to be a schizophrenic. The prison's supervising
psy-chologist, Kelly Rhodes, countered that Fields was trying to
fake his way to easier time. Under oath, Rhodes described
self-mutilation as a game.

"They'll compete with each other to see who can cut because it's
fun," she said, according to a deposition.

The lawsuit resulted in a court order moving Fields in 2005 to
the Tamms mental health unit where, like all inmates at the
supermax, he is held in solitary but receives treatment.

The psychiatrists who testified on his behalf said Fields'
multiple convictions for aggravated assault against guards resulted
from behavior symptomatic of his mental illness.

If he hadn't been charged with crimes in prison, Fields could
have been paroled in 2004 after serving 20 years of a 40-year
sen-tence. But Fields must serve all the extra time for throwing
food, urine and committing other offenses against guards. That
amounts to 34 years, or 54 years total that he must serve before
becoming eligible for parole in 2038, at age 79.

Solitary confinement

Illinois has about 45,000 state prisoners. The state built Tamms
to reduce violence among prisoners statewide by taking the "worst
of the worst" and holding them in solitary confinement at one
location for about a year, or until their behavior improved.

But 54 inmates at Tamms have been held in continuous solitary
confinement for more than 10 years, according to an investiga-tion
by the Belleville News-Democrat. They include 39 like Fields who
have been held continuously since they were transferred there in
1998, the year the prison opened.

Many others have been held for seven, eight or nine years. All
Tamms inmates are held in solitary. They spend 23 hours a day in
their cells. In March, the torture watchdog group Amnesty
International issued a statement citing Tamms: "The harsh
conditions of isolation endured by many prisoners for years on end
appear to be unnecessarily punitive and may breach international
stan-dards for humane treatment."

George Welborn, Tamms' first warden, defended the prison's
treatment of prisoners.

"It's very, very hard time. … Is it constitutional
incarceration? Yes it is. The court cases to this point have shown
that. We're not beating them. We're not starving them," he
said.

Shortly after Gov. Pat Quinn appointed Michael Randle as the new
director of the Illinois Department of Corrections in June, Quinn
directed him to investigate Tamms. Randle said after spending a day
at Tamms, he believed it held highly dangerous prison-ers who could
not be imprisoned elsewhere. Records show that the majority of
Tamms inmates are convicted murderers and that a small number have
murdered staff and inmates at other prisons.

"I am not comfortable at this point having those offenders out
of Tamms," he said during a telephone interview.

Randle would not say whether he considers 10 years and more in
solitary confinement to be cruel. He conceded that harsh conditions
such as not allowing telephone calls, religious services or
education programs might be eased.

"There are things we are going to continue to look at in terms
of giving offenders an avenue to demonstrate the appropriate
con-duct to earn their way out of Tamms," he said.

The News-Democrat's investigation found that Tamms may not only
house the "worst of the worst." Prison and court records also
raised questions about the prison medical staff's ability to
identify inmates with serious mental problems who need
treat-ment.

The investigation showed:

-Of 247 Tamms inmates listed June 30 on the prison's roster, 138
had not been convicted of a crime after entering the prison
system.

-Of the remaining 109 inmates convicted of a crime after
entering prison, 55 committed assaults such as throwing body wastes
and spitting on or struggling with guards, and possessing
contraband or homemade weapons -acts that did not lead to serious
injury and can be attributed in some cases to mental illness and a
need for self-protection.

-Of the more than 250 inmates transferred to Tamms since 1999,
records provided by the Department of Corrections show that only
six who passed through the mental health screening process were
placed in the prison's Special Treatment Unit for seriously
mentally ill prisoners, despite a 2005 U.S. Department of Justice
study that shows that 15 to 23 percent of state prison inmates are
seriously mentally ill. Department of Corrections chief counsel Ed
Huntley would not provide information about the total of inmates
Tamms staff rejected for mental health reasons who were returned to
other lockups.

-Sixteen inmates at the supermax entered the prison system for
relatively minor crimes, such as car theft, forgery, burglary and
drug offenses, but incurred huge amounts of additional time - 92
years in one case - for in-prison crimes including guard assaults
and possessing a shank, or homemade knife. State law requires this
time be served consecutively, or after the original sentence.

Tamms, a 500-bed, $70-million cluster of concrete buildings in
Alexander County, is smaller than some county jails. The state
keeps it half full so that there is room to transfer inmates if a
riot occurs elsewhere.

Many of its inmates live in segregation or the disciplinary part
of the prison.

Information from the Department of Corrections shows that from
Jan. 1 to June 30, Tamms transferred 15 inmates to other prisons.
But of this number, three inmates were within a few months to a
year from parole and had to be transferred under a regulation that
prohibits Tamms prisoners from being released into the public
directly from the supermax.

A 2001 study by Southern Illinois University-Carbondale graduate
student Chad Briggs questioned the value of Tamms as a de-terrent
to violence. He concluded that despite sending inmates to the
supermax, the rate of assaults on guards throughout the prison
system either stayed the same or increased.

Prison violence has increased in recent years, said the guards'
union spokesman Anders Lindall of the American Federation of State,
County and Municipal Employees. Too few guards and prisoner
overcrowding are to blame, he said.

"The state tells us they can't track the data, even on a
facility-by-facility basis, but based on the anecdotal evidence
that we've seen from our members, violence has increased," Lindall
said.

The Tamms Year Ten Committee, a confederation of activists
supported by at least two Chicago area state representatives, is
also monitoring conditions at the prison. One of the state
representatives is Julie Hamos, D-Evanston, who has introduced a
bill to improve conditions at Tamms.

"It is a form of insanity to put people in a place that provokes
mental illness and then waste taxpayers' money to treat the
symptoms," said committee member Laurie Jo Reynolds. "Or worse yet,
releasing them without treatment. … Either they went in crazy, or
they go crazy once they are there."

Cruelty?

Solitary confinement beyond 30-90 days invariably leads to
mental breakdown and behavior that becomes worse, not better,
according to Dr. Terry A. Kupers of the Wright Institute, a
clinical psychology graduate school in Berkeley, Calif. Kupers is
one of three psychiatrists who diagnosed Fields as a
schizophrenic.

"Anything in solitary longer than three months, what it does is
the individual feels hopeless. One of the universal fears that
peo-ple in supermaxes tell me is, 'I'm going to die in here,"' said
Kupers, who has conducted hundreds of court-ordered interviews of
men in long-term isolation, including Tamms inmates.

"They know they can't control their behavior enough, or please
their wardens enough to ever get out," he said. "Twenty-three hours
a day alone in a cell causes many inmates to brutally attack
themselves.

"In the adult male population of the United States,
self-mutilation occurs only in solitary confinement," he said.
"It's an epidemic across the country. They're not faking."

In a prison population such as Tamms, where most inmates are
murderers, Chris Marcum of Granite City might seem out of place. At
age 20, he was sentenced in Madison County Circuit Court to six
years for burglary with parole after three years.

But Marcum, now 32, got nine years added to his sentence because
he possessed a shank and committed other in-prison crimes. In Tamms
he was known as a "cutter." His left arm is covered front and back
from forearm to biceps with long, whitish scars.

"I just wanted to feel something. It was the only way I coped
with, at the time, with being incarcerated. You lose all sense of
eve-rything. It helped me with what I was going through, but it
hurt a lot," he said.

Unlike some cutters, he said he did not handle his body
wastes.

"I've seen in other prisons inmates cut on themselves, but there
wasn't that many people doing it. But at Tamms, every wing I went
on there was at least one inmate that had a glass shield on his
door, played with his feces and cut on himself."

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The shields prevent inmates from throwing body wastes through
any of about 400 dime-sized holes in their cell doors.

His mother, Nancy Marcum, would visit him in the Tamms visiting
room, where the inmate is behind Plexiglas and chained to a
concrete block. She said her son, "kept his arms under the table so
I couldn't see. When I found out this was happening, all I could do
was cry."

In several lawsuits challenging conditions at Tamms, prison
officials have testified that self-mutilation is not a symptom of
serious mental illness because the inmate can stop at will.

Chicago attorney Jean Snyder, the lead attorney in the lawsuit
involving Faygie Fields, said, "What kind of a guy is slicing up
his penis and his arms to get out of prison? Is it an answer to say
he could stop it if he wanted to?"

Ignoring symptoms?

When he was 7 years old, Tamms inmate Jerome Moore used drugs.
At age 10, he was confined to a state mental ward. At 11, he was
selling drugs and living on the street. He was shot that same year
and spent weeks in a hospital. Sent to juvenile detention at 13,
Moore was suspected of but never charged with a double homicide. At
age 17, Moore was sentenced to state prison for at-tempted murder.
In 2000, at age 19, he was sent to Tamms.

What was different in Moore's case was that besides the finding
of "malingering," Althoff confirmed a diagnosis of "intermittent
explosive disorder," uncontrollable rage totally out of proportion
to a perceived insult or threat.

Moore faced a maximum of 23 years for attempted murder but now
must serve at least 38 years. The extra time came from assaults on
guards - incidents that, except for one, did not include a weapon
or result in serious injury but instead consisted of throwing food
and body wastes or twisting away from handcuffs.

Psychiatrist Dr. Stuart Grassian of Chestnut Hill, Mass., who
was on the staff of Harvard Medical School for nearly 30 years and
has written widely about the effects of solitary confinement, said
inmates like Moore are likely to continue to commit impulsive
violence as long as they are kept in solitary confinement. He said
prison mental health staff often have distorted views of supermax
inmates.

"There's a tremendous pull toward seeing everything that you're
looking at as bad behavior that needs to be punished, rather than
recognizing that it's actually a response to mental illness,"
Grassian said. "People tend to think of them (supermax inmates) as
the James Cagneys of the prison system. They're not. They are
actually the wretched of the earth. … The paradigm (model) in the
prison system is if you punish bad behavior enough it'll get
better. That's obviously a paradigm that doesn't work."

Marcum, the former Tamms inmate from Granite City, said he
remembers a lot of behavior that caused guards to react, but none
more bizarre than when inmate Anthony Gay of Rock Island ate his
own flesh. The incident is corroborated in federal court
docu-ments.

"I was in the infirmary for 11 days because I was on a hunger
strike and he was there on suicidal watch," Marcum said. "And every
four hours they came around and took my vitals. And he did it right
in front of the window when I was standing there at my cell getting
my vitals checked. He just cut a little piece of his skin off and
ate it. Right in front of them and they didn't do nothing except go
in his cell and search for the object he used to cut on
himself."

Not for the long haul

Welborn, Tamms' first warden, hadn't expected the reporters who
showed up at his door in Anna, 20 miles north of the prison in
Tamms. He regarded them warily. But when Welborn, who helped design
Tamms, heard one of them say, "Darrell Cannon says hello," he
smiled and said, "How is DC?"

Welborn and Cannon, a murderer convicted in Cook County, formed
an unlikely alliance at the maximum-security Menard Correctional
Center in Chester. Welborn was the warden; Cannon was an inmate
who, he said, helped Welborn ease tension between gang members and
guards.

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Cannon said he was astounded in 1998 to be rousted out of his
Menard cell and shipped to the newly opened supermax at Tamms. When
he got to Tamms, Cannon said Welborn came to his cell and told him,
"Hey look. You do one year down here and if you don't have any
tickets, no disciplinary problems, after that you'll be shifted
outside again."

But Cannon did nine years at Tamms and got out only after a
federal judge ordered his parole following testimony that crooked
Chicago detectives set him up on the murder charge.

Welborn, who retired in 2002, said he never expected inmates to
be held at Tamms for 10 years or more.

"I don't lose a lot of sleep over those guys who have been there
10 years … (but) I think they should have been given the
opportu-nity to go back to a reduced security facility and then, if
they screw up again, it's right back to Tamms. It was not intended
to be a place where guys would be there for eight to 10 years."

In a lawsuit deposition, Welborn disputed allegations that the
policy of holding prisoners alone amounted to solitary
confine-ment.

"This isn't like throwing a guy in a closet," he testified.

Cannon disagreed.

"It was total solitary confinement. There were times I would
wake up shaking. It would be my system trying to, I don't know, go
haywire. I would have to get up off that concrete bed and go to the
sink and run some cold water and wait until the sink fills up and
then throw the water all over me," he said. "And I would have to
talk to myself and say, 'Hey, look. Do not break. You can't let
this happen."'

Cannon said he never engaged in self-mutilation but knew of many
inmates who did.

"I would walk the floor in circles. And I may do that for two
hours straight," he said.

He set aside a special night for the music of his youth.

"Saturday night was dedicated to all the old songs. Blue Moon.
Stand By Me … all those old songs I could think of. I would try to
remember the words. I would sing just loud enough where I could
hear myself."

A place that has no ending

Richard Conner, a murderer doing life, attempted to hang himself
in his cell at Tamms in December, but wound up instead in a coma at
Heartland Regional Medical Center in Marion.

Although the Department of Corrections won't talk about it,
members of the Tamms Year Ten Committee believe Conner tried to
kill himself a few weeks earlier by slitting his wrists.

After recovering, the prison system sent Conner, 38, to its
Dixon Psychiatric Unit and then on to the maximum-security
Stateville Correctional Center at Joliet. And there, on April 2,
guards opened the cell that Conner shared with Jameson S. Leezer
and found Leezer dead. Leezer, a car thief, was 18 days from
parole.

An autopsy showed that Leezer had been strangled, and Conner,
the only other person in the locked cell, was the obvious suspect.
Instead of returning him to the prison system psychiatric hospital
at Dixon, authorities sent Conner back to Tamms.

No decision has been made on whether to prosecute Conner for
Leezer's murder. A Department of Corrections directive issued on
May 11 stated that any Tamms inmate transferred out must be held in
a single cell.

In another incident, guards found Robert Foor, 33, dead on June
23 in his cell in the Tamms Special Treatment Unit, or mental ward.
He was convicted of robbery and burglary in 1994 and given nine
years but accrued eight years of extra time because of in-prison
convictions.

Debbie Elsoff of Malta, Ill., Foor's mother, said that an
autopsy did not determine how her son died. She said that when she
informed prison officials that she could not afford to pay for her
son's cremation or to have his body shipped home, they said they
would cremate him there but could not turn over his remains because
of state law.

"I cried all night when I heard that," said Elsoff.

Later, a non-profit group agreed to pay for Foor's cremation,
and his remains were sent to his mother.

Malcolm Young, who until recently was the director of the prison
reform organization The John Howard Association, said the policy at
Tamms to use extreme discipline to respond to problems that many
consider are caused by mental illness causes psychological
deterioration, even worse behavior and sometimes suicide.

"It is not a dirty place. It's not a hole in the ground with
mice and rats and everything else," he said, "But it is just total
isolation and it operates to purposely deprive the men that are
there from contact with other people."

Young, a lawyer at Northwestern University's Bluhm Legal Clinic,
said even the way inmates are moved to the yard reinforces the
debilitating effect of solitary confinement. The yard represents
the one hour a day when inmates are not in their cells, yet they
are still alone in a concrete box with a roof of steel mesh that
half covers the sky.

Inmates head to the yard handcuffed and shackled inside a
special caged chute with two guards outside the wire keeping
pace.

"It's just the mechanical way they do it. It's like a ballet
that emphasizes the separation between the prisoner and any other
human being," he said. "The design of the place. The way the
windows are situated too high to see out of. All of it just drives
home that you are in a totally sterile environment as is possible
to put you in and keep it legal."

For more than eight years, Nancy Meyer of Elgin has corresponded
with Tamms prisoners. She often drives the 700-mile round trip to
visit about a dozen men there she has come to know well.

Meyer said she sends money to inmates and contacts family
members who often haven't heard about their loved ones for years.
Some tell her not to call again.

Of the inmates on her list, Faygie Fields is her favorite. She
says that even though Fields is a grown man and a convicted
murderer, something about his optimism, even cheerfulness, makes
her heart go out to him. In his Tamms mugshot, Fields is
smiling.

"I see that face and he smiles and I say, 'Faygie, how are you
doing? You're not hurting yourself anymore because if you are I
won't come to see you.' He always says he isn't, but I know he
will."

In a handwritten letter dated April 6, Fields used a plus sign
for the word "and," capital letters for emphasis and dropped
ques-tion marks in odd places.

While the sentences were fragmented and the grammar vague, the
message was clear: "Please know that Tamms is driving ME CRAZY all
of them keep saying none of us can leave here. But keeps all here?
+ in a Eternal Twilight Zone that has no ending?"

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